


Coming Back to Where You Started is Not the Same

by sugarybowl



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Off-screen Relationship(s), Pre-Relationship, Tags May Change, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-20 20:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10669971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarybowl/pseuds/sugarybowl
Summary: Two new and mysterious players roll into Central City and no one is happy about it. Who are they and what will the presence mean for the budding alliance between Team Flash and the Rogues?





	1. Chapter 1

It’s not often that Barry regrets having second to second updates of his newsfeed, but when he’s just trying to sneak some Netflix in with his friends and Twitter starts screaming THE FLASH IS ON FIRE he really hates the internet.

“What the hell man,” he sighs as he reads through the reports. To his left and right everyone in the room does the same.

“Well it doesn’t look like anyone is hurt,” Iris says, “maybe it’s someone friendly?”

“A speedster on fire sounds terrifying though,” Wally adds, “maybe we should go check it out.”

“Yeah man,” Cisco agrees, “wait hold on - Lisa?”

Barry turns to watch Cisco answer his phone with that look of awe and horror that only Lisa Snart can inspire in him.

“Yeah - um yeah I’ll ask him to meet you there. You’re okay? Yeah um, Caitlin says he’s stable-yes she knows not to treat the scaring more than strictly necessary. Yeah okay.”

Iris elbows him and they both share a look over Cisco’s obvious blush as he hangs up.

“Um - Lisa says the Rogues just ran into someone with a cold gun but she says her brother has his on him right now and he never has two fully built at the same time. He didn’t want her to call but what with the speedster on fire and Rory out of commission she’s kind of um worried in general.”

“It is terrifying that Snart can mass produce those guns if he wants to,” Iris says as she grabs her purse.

“He wouldn’t though,” Barry says as he watches her, “he wouldn’t be special anymore if he did. Where are you going?”

“To S.T.A.R. labs,” she says as she pokes at her phone, “I already texted Caitlin. Come on, a speedster on fire and someone other than Snart running around with a cold gun? We can’t sit around and wait for the disaster to happen.”

Barry nods, “Iris is right. Wally why don’t you go with her and Cait, I’ll go with Cisco to meet Lisa.”

\- - - 

“Scarlet,” Snart says as they enter their latest warehouse, “I see my sister has lost what little filial respect she had.”

“Shut up Lenny,” Lisa says as she walks up to them, “Cisco and the Flash are doing us a favor. On top of the favor of looking after Mick.”

“It’s not a favor,” Barry says, “we weren’t going to let Rory die while we have the means to help him. As for this - we’re as interested as you to keep someone new with a cold gun off the streets. I don’t know them and I don’t trust them.”

Snart smirks. “That mean you trust me, then?”

Barry hesitates at that before conceding, “Better the devil I know.”

That seems to bring an honest laugh out of Snart.

“Well since you’re here I figure you can do that obnoxious tracking thing of yours and cool off the competition,” he says.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Cisco admits, “how sure are you that it’s the same as your cold gun?”

“Look our sources aren’t the brightest, but they said it shot ice just as well,” Lisa says, “and yes I know it’s not shooting ice – I’m telling you they’re not the brightest.”

“And what were they doing when they came across the…imposter?”

“Botching a perfectly simple casing by trying to rob the place during lunch time and run off with the loot,” Snart drawls, as if that matter annoyed him far more than an imposter. “Did me a favor whoever it was, froze their hands clean off – old school thieving punishment.”

“You seem impressed.”

“Hardly, but I know when to be grateful – novelty’s gone though, there’s only room for one Captain Cold in this city. Besides, we’ve got an exclusive deal don’t we Flash?”

“We do,” Barry answers, “we’ll find them and bring the gun back to S.T.A.R. labs.”

“Great. Now get out,” Snart says, “I’ve got more planning to do after those idiots ruined two months of work.”

“Shouldn’t we be trying to keep him from robbing whatever he’s trying to rob?” Cisco asks him under his breath.

Barry sighs and throws his arm over Cisco’s shoulder, “A deal is a deal.”

\- - -

“No sign of them yet,” Caitlin says as Barry and Cisco enter the lab, “I mean everyone saw them this morning but it was only for a second and now no sightings. That’s why everyone thinks it was just you on fire – mostly the twitter verse is worried about you.”

Barry smiles, it’s nice that sometimes the city collectively shows concern about his well-being. Still, he knows whomever that was wasn’t him and the people of Central are right – that speedster could be in trouble.

“Aren’t Iris and Wally here?”

“Well since there’s been no reports, Iris went to the paper to see if anyone had anything they were holding back on publishing and I managed to convince Wally to go off and do some rounds.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“He was doing that weird protective thing where he kept trying to monitor Rory for me,” she huffs out, “as if he was going to rise out a hospital bed and attack me.”

“There’s actually nothing far-fetched about that,” Cisco says, “I still don’t know why you insist on being alone with an unconscious arsonist all the time.”

“Right now he’s my patient,” she says, “and all of the fussing around me as if he’s going to set the place on fire in his sleep is only getting in my way. His burns aren’t healing properly and I have to treat them constantly if I’m going to ward off infections.”

“Alright,” Barry says, “we have more pressing issues right now – I mean – I don’t mean… he’s unconscious…”

“I know what you mean Barry, what’s going on?”

“Someone has a copy of Snart’s cold gun. Someone we know absolutely nothing about.”

“I mean we know that they ice off the hands of thieves so maybe we have nothing to worry about,” Cisco adds, “but I’d still feel better if we knew who these new players are – both of them.”

“Let’s try the tracking like we said – though there’s a chance the gun is different in a way we’re not prepared for,” Barry sighs. He runs a hand through his hair and after a moment takes a look about the lab. It’s clean and clear as they usually keep it, but there are little things – things he had noticed before – but one crisis after another kept him from bringing it up.

“Cait,” he says softly as he picks up a paperback novel, innocuous except for the fact that Caitlin doesn’t leisure read at work, “you know you don’t have to do this right?”

“Do what,” Caitlin says, still focused on the screens in front of her.

“I know you lock down the labs every night while you’re still in here. And that you’ve only gone to your apartment long enough to do a single load of laundry which is just about the only thing you can’t do from here.”

“Rory’s stable but he still needs constant –“

“This has nothing to do with Mick, you’re imprisoning yourself.”

“Prison doesn’t have Netflix,” she shurgs, still typing away.

“Caitlin-“

“It’s the only way I can sleep at night, Barry. There – are you happy? It’s the only way I can rest knowing I won’t go out of my mind again and … it’s just the only way.”

“Caitlin what happened to Julian wasn’t –“

“Don’t. Don’t you dare say it wasn’t my fault.”

“He wouldn’t want you doing this to yourself.”

“You’re right, locking myself in S.T.A.R. labs isn’t going to keep the next man I fall in love with safe. It didn’t keep him safe. I should lock myself in a convent instead.”

“Cait-“ Cisco starts.

“Don’t you two have potential supervillains to catch?”

“You’re not going to…”

“I’m a doctor damn it, not a superhero. I’m going to go do what I’m good at which is taking care of my patient. If you two want me to help the team then bring me people to patch up not puzzles to solve or slef-help crap.”

“At least she hasn’t locked herself in the pipeline,” Cisco whispers.

“Where do you think her bedroom is?”

“That’s all sorts of messed up Barr.”

“I know. But we have to give her time, it’s all we can possibly do.”

“I’m getting no trace of the gun and no trail of the speedforce except for that one hot spot that everyone and their brother took a picture of.”

“Except the trail goes cold there,” Barry sighs.

“God, don’t Snart hear you say that.”

“The left over energy suggests that they came through a break of some kind but there’s no other earth vibrations anywhere.”

“So the speedster at the very least came through a breach but from this very Earth. So could they be-“

“Time travelers,” Caitlin says, storming back into the room with the same momentum as she left it with, “they don’t vibrate at a different frequency but time jumps using some kind of ship or machine make miniscule changes to their blood chemistry. They’re almost impossible to notice in Barry because his powers make so much noise in his blood, but if we compare your blood to the a sample from a non-meta time traveler we should be able to isolate the markers and take them even if they refrain from using the speedforce.”

Cisco whistles out, “Damn Cait, have you been using a comatose time traveling Rogue as a guinea pig?

“No, that would be unethical. But he and the rest of the legends signed off the use of some samples a while back.”

“How’d you manage that?”

Caitlin shrugs, “I have my ways.”

“Alright, let’s try this,” Barry says.

 “Okay we’re on. Looks like I was right, we’re picking up five distinct signals you and Rory in here and I assume this in the port is –“

“Snart, yes.”

“So that means these two… are sitting in Jitters?”

“Two?”

“I’m picking up two of them. No reports of any disturbances at Jitters – people are posting their chai lattes and scones with abandon.”

“That’s good news but we need to go check this out regardless- do you wanna join us?”

“No I,” Caitlin shakes her head, “I’m sorry about before but I really feel safest here. Okay?”

Barry and Cisco share a look before nodding at her and heading out to investigate their visitors.

\---

“I don’t suppose Caitlin’s tracker is going to tell us what table they’re sitting at?”

Cisco gives him a rather judgmental eyebrow.

“No I didn’t think so. What are we supposed to do, everyone here looks so…normal.”

“Yeah, we can’t exactly go up to everyone here and be all ‘excuse me are you a time traveler and perhaps in possession of an incredibly dangerous weapon?’”

“Why yes, we are” a bright voice says from just behind them. Barry turns, impossibly startled by the woman standing inches away from him. She’s short and small and strikingly familiar.

“Woah, she looks just like –“

“Iris?”

The woman smiles, it looks a bit strained.

“Spoilers? Um. We need sanctuary.”

Barry wrenches his eyes away from her to look at the man beside her. He’s tall and broad and honestly frightening. Barry also feels a strange familiarity but can’t place the man’s face as easily. Time travelers asking for sanctuary, Barry can safely say he never expected it to be like this at all.

“Why don’t we talk somewhere more private?”

“Because we’re being ignored just fine here and I prefer public spaces when I’m getting to know a stranger. Now let’s sit, don’t make a scene now,” she says as the man standing at her side seems to glower his agreement.

They take a seat and Barry stares at the four drinks on the table. They’re all different and his…his is perfect.

“Yo…did you stalk my coffee order?” Cisco asks.

“A wild guess,” the woman replies. Everything about her is Iris except…well except where it wasn’t. Something about the eyes…not the color but something indescribable about their intensity.”

“Who are you?”

“No one I can tell you about,” she says, “I know you’re jumping to all sorts of conclusions and I can’t stop you. But you should know that these things are fragile.”

“What…when are you from?”

The woman looks over at the man and takes a deep breath, “2037.”

“Did you randomly choose when in the past you’d come to or-“

“Before you were born right? Isn’t that super dangerous?”

She nods. “It makes it the perfect hiding place.”

Barry leans forward in his seat. “Hiding from what?”

“The less you know the better, you must know that.”

“Should I recognize you?”

She leans away from him, shaking her head.

“Don’t put me in that position.”

“I’m sorry I –“

“I understand,” she tells him, “but you must too.”

“The cold gun,” Barry says looking to the man beside her.

The woman whistles to call back her attention, “It’s mine.”

“Oh I-“

“I brought it for protection,” she says shortly.

“And freezing off a couple of men’s hands was protection?”

“That was instinct,” she says, “I was vulnerable and they were stupid. That’s dangerous.”

“And the speedster on fire?” Cisco asks.

The man beside her shifts in his seat which seems much too small for him.

“I wasn’t on fire,” he says, his voice rough as if from disuse.

“That would be me again,” the woman interjects, “or at least my clothes.”

“Goddamn told you not to-“

“Excuse me if I don’t exactly take fashion advice from you,” she snaps back.

The man nearly growls, “S’not about fashion when you wear flammable shi-“

Cisco coughs pointedly when it seems the two might make the scene they were trying to prevent earlier.

“Ummm?”

“Right,” she says, “Sorry. I was wearing something unsuitable for our form of travel. It was a hiccup. Everyone is fine.”

The man looks as if he’s tempted to protest again but thinks better of it.

“So how about it,” she says, her voice oddly cheerful again, “sanctuary?”

“You’ll have to stay at S.T.A.R. labs until we can figure something else out,” Barry says tentatively.

“That’s perfect,” she says, moving closer to the man beside her in a nearly imperceptible way, “We really just need a place to crash until we get the all clear.”

“And when should that be?” Cisco asks.

“A week? Two years? Hard to tell,” she says as casual as anything.

Barry takes another deep breath, “Can we have your names?”

The two share a look and the woman nods with another strained smile.

“I’m Mimi,” she tells them, “and this is Robbie.”


	2. Chapter 2

Caitlin was having a rough month in a rough life and more than anything she was tired. She didn’t need sleep or rest, more than anything she needed to have some control for a while. A few days without something cosmic and futuristic going wrong. Time travelers did not bode well for that faint hope.

Still at least for now she had somewhere to retreat to, a project of sorts, somewhere useful to focus her energy on. Of course, some people would argue that it wasn’t useful to look after someone like Mick Rory – to make sure he was comfortable and treating him like she would any other patient – but that wasn’t any of their business. She was a doctor and above all that meant that the well-being of someone under her care precluded who they were or what they’d done or what they would do if they were in full health. A doctor doesn’t get to judge their patient and when the patient is as staunchly unconscious as Rory currently is, a doctor doesn’t have to worry about being judged either.

Caitlin knows that to the best of medical knowledge people in a comatose state cannot process language as one normally does, though the likelihood is high that there is some form of awareness in all but the most extreme cases. All in all it’s likely that Rory’s brain registers the tone and cadence of her voice and the vague fact that she is speaking but it is overall near impossible that he would be able to recall or recount anything that she says to him and so she ends up saying quite a lot.

“I can’t even find it in myself to be suspicious of them, it’s so exhausting. If we trust them, if we grow to love them, what will happen in the end? They will either betray us or leave us, and in the best case scenario they’ll do the latter of their own free will. But we’ll end up where we started. I feel like a little kid with a tree house saying that no new kids are allowed. But it isn’t as if I haven’t tried and lost again. I just – I want to keep what few friends … and associates? I guess… safe and alive and that’s hard enough. I’m tired of new faces that will only hurt in the end.”

She sighs and goes about her routine of tending to Mick’s wounds, chemical burns that he would likely not appreciate – not even in that twisted poetic way of his. There was no flame involved in their making and so no matter what she has been told by Lisa over and over again about how Mick adores his burns, she is going to heal these. No matter how stubborn they are.

“There’s something very … complete about you, you know? Even when you’re in pieces like this. Snart can be a contradiction but you always make sense – you just want to burn things to the ground. Nothing puzzling about it. Although it’s disconcerting to see you without that glower. It’s strange to see you peaceful. I guess that’s sad isn’t it? But well, who knows. Maybe this is just what you look like when you sleep.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Caitlin spins around to see the young man from the future, the speedster without the speedster’s build. His name twitches in her mind. Robbie. It makes no sense for someone like him, maybe that’s why he chose it since she’s under no delusions they’ve given their real names. And it’s so close to Ronnie it stabs her.

“Excuse me, but if you’re going to be anywhere near here you’re going to have to put a mask on.”

“You’re not wearing one,” he says, his voice deep and even.

“I’m not a stranger for the future carrying god knows what in his system because the timeline must be protected so we can’t take a blood sample. I won’t have you infecting the burns that are already difficult enough to work on.”

“What makes them difficult?” he asks, even as he reaches for the medical masks without pausing to ask about where she keeps them.

She stares at him as he sets about picking one up with his football player hands and hooking it over his ears.

“They were made by highly corrosive and annoyingly alien chemicals. It took me seventeen hours to make sure all of it was off and the burning wasn’t progressing. Which in itself was incredibly difficult because he was already comatose when he got here. So either I haven’t gotten every bit of toxin out of his system or its done enough damage that it’s taking him this long to recover.”

He peeks over her shoulder at Rory.

“How long’s he been this way?”

“Why do you care?”

“Just… curious,” he says.

“Yeah well so are we and yet you have the perfect excuse not to answer any of our questions,” she accuses. 

“Yeah,” he admits, “I guess we do.” 

 He goes silent after that and Caitlin turns back to her work, applying antiseptics and salves to each of the wounds with precision and as light a touch as she could muster. Anyone would tell her that someone in his state couldn’t feel pain, even if she were purposefully trying to inflict it. But being gentle settled her mind and gave her something to focus on.  

“I can answer a question for you,” he says after a quiet spell.

She hums, without looking up from her work. “How’s that?”

“I mean. If you have a question, I can… try to answer it.”

“I have more than one,” she says, dropping the used gauze and moving on to a fresh square.

“I know,” he tells her, “but that wasn’t the offer I made.”

“How old are you?”

“Really? That’s the question you want answered?”

“It’s the only one I can think of that you could possibly answer for me,” she says.

“I’m almost 18,” he answers.

“It’s really dangerous isn’t it,” she says, with her suspicions confirmed, “to come to a time before you were conceived.”

She looks over and sees it as plainly as she’d been denying before. They’re only children. And they’re scared, running from something in the most extreme way. They’re scared children and she’s going to care for them and help them and ultimately they will hurt her.

“Cost benefit turns out that it’s better to risk not being born at all than what we were facing,” he says, “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”

“That’s okay. I do … I do understand. Even though I’m the only one in the room that’s never time traveled before.”

The boy smiles and there’s something in it, something that makes her want to say in her softest voice that it’s all going to be okay.

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but I gotta say it’s got its perks,” he says, and his voice is as soft as she imagined hers and he’s looking at her with eyes that she does not understand and she knows without a doubt that this one is definitely going to hurt.


End file.
